Fountain (1917)
Duchamp’s most notorious readymade was a manufactured urinal entitled Fountain. Conceived for a show promoting avant-garde art, Fountain took advantage of the show’s lack of juried panels, which invariably excluded forward-looking artists.
Under a pseudonym, “R. Mutt,” Duchamp submitted Fountain. It was a prank, meant to taunt his avant-garde peers. For some of the show’s organizers this was too much — was the artist equating modern art with a toilet fixture? — and Fountain was “misplaced” for the duration of the exhibition. It disappeared soon thereafter.
As surely as it was a prank, Fountain was also, like the other readymades, a calculated attack on the most basic conventions of art. Duchamp defended the piece in an unsigned article in The Blind Man, a one-shot magazine published by his friend Beatrice Wood. To the charge that Fountain was mere plagiarism, “a plain piece of plumbing,” he replied “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.”
At the time, almost nobody understood what Duchamp was talking about. But fifty years later everyday objects would be commonplace in art.
R. Mutt Meaning
Like much of what Duchamp did and said, the meaning of R. Mutt and other pseudonyms such as Rrose Selavy is up for debate; Duchamp was famous for his use of intentional misdirection in interviews, so everything he said needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
In William Camfield's Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917, the author quotes from an interview with Duchamp on the origins of "R. Mutt"
In William Camfield's Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917, the author quotes from an interview with Duchamp on the origins of "R. Mutt"
"Duchamp stated many years later that the pseudonym "Mutt" came from the Mott Works [J.L. Mott Iron Works, manufacturer of the urinal] but was modified because "Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily strip cartoon "Mutt and Jeff" which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man...And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That's not a bad name for a "piasotiere." Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT."L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp (1919)
Artist: Marcel Duchamp (1887- 1968), whose sense of humour first came to attention in 1917, when he submitted, under the name R Mutt, a urinal to a New York art exhibition. Duchamp anonymously defended R Mutt in a magazine, and gave a definition of his new art of the readymade: whether or not Mr Mutt made it with his own hand has no importance. He chose it. He took an everyday article, placed it so that its usual significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - and created a new thought for that object.
Subject: The Mona Lisa, painted in the 16th century by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and the most celebrated portrait in the world.
Distinguishing features: The Mona Lisa's deep-set eyes and round face do not conflict with Duchamp's act of violence. The beard and moustache seem a completion. Duchamp said the Mona Lisa becomes a man - not a woman disguised as a man, but a real man. This hints at a different meaning from vandalism, for all the crudeness of those letters, L.H.O.O.Q., which sound out the French sentence: "She has a hot arse." This is not simply an attack on the mass-produced tourist icon the Mona Lisa had become, but rather an inter-pretation of it. Sigmund Freud had psychoanalysed Leonardo's art and related the artist's inability to finish his works to the sublimation of his sexual life to art. He also argued that Leonardo was homosexual.
Duchamp's Mona Lisa is a Freudian joke. Duchamp reveals, in a simple gesture, that which the painting conceals. But this is not merely an allusion to Freud. Duchamp uncovers an ambiguity of gender at the heart of Leonardo's aesthetic - that Leonardo sees the male form in the female.
This kind of hidden self- portrait is what Duchamp discovers in his rectified readymade. His Dadaist intervention redeems Leonardo's masterpiece from the banality of reproduction and returns it to the private world of creation.
